I’ve been getting a bit tired of playing sudoku on my phone, and thought… how about Duolingo? Spanish because I took it back in high school? German, because I started to sort of learn a little German before (and tried to struggle through an Egyptology book in German, and listen to industrial music some of which is in German)? Or Japanese, because… taiko and anime? Right, Japanese it is.
It’s been going okay so far, but it just had me start learning some hiragana and that’s a bit more of an intimidating prospect. I’ll try trusting in the process for now but I might switch to German if things get too dicey.
Finished up my study of Morpheus, except I didn’t quite… I am going to look into the idea of using the filter sequencer, a feature I’ve completely ignored, as a kind of categorization system.
The other project has been to find an approximate software substitute for Djupviks Box of Angels, or at least, something that gives me similar vibes. The requirements are three bandpass filters — fairly steep ones I think — in parallel, with a gain control for each. There seems to be surprisingly little software that can do this, either feature-wise or to the satisfaction of my ears. So that’s meant cooking up stuff in Bitwig or VCV Rack.
Most of the filters I’ve tried need to be doubled up in series to get a steep enough response. I’ve had better luck with a couple of VCV Rack modules though:
NOI Sinensis is an all-in-one parallel multi bandpass filter where the tuning spread is controlled by a ratio. It needs a quiet input to not distort, and is not quite as steep as I’d like, but the results are excellent.
Prism Droplet is not to be confused with Sinevibes Droplet which is a reverb, or Finn Mitchel-Anyon’s Droplets, a generative sequencer. This one is a steep-Q bandpass that has a switch to engage a “second pass” built in, removing the need to put another one in serial, plus an envelope follower output.
While I was slowly writing and editing this, Bunker Archaeology arrived. It is definitely “the Bruxa of reverb”… except where Tony and Alessandro put a lot of thought and refinement into design and details, this module is punk AF. The knob ranges are bizarre, the white LED for the tremolo side is a blazing strobe light, it distorts easily, the tremolo sometimes seems to let the dry signal through. I stuck a bit of colored label over the bright LED but I kind of feel like it should be a Band-Aid. It’s great though. It’s raw, but with the rest of the modular plus the DAW I can “cook” it a bit to serve whatever my needs are at the time.